I would be willing to lay some of the blame for this specifically on Innosilicon and Bitmain. After years of no scrypt mining innovation and very little production, these two mining tech giants suddenly crank out gobs of scrypt hash. The absolute strange thing was Innosilicon's comment that the miner that they would sell you would be "the king" for the next 3 months.

I highly suspect that for every unit they sell to a consumer, which is between 250mhs and 275mhs depending on which one you buy, they likely add 5 times that to their own pools to compensate. I think that they have so much on-demand scrypt hash just sitting by idle at the moment that they are basically gaming the collective group of remaining significant scrypt coins, which as you probably know is a very small number.

The reason that I think this is that I have seen Litecoin's network hash rate rise as high as ~2900 GH/s with F2Pool raking in around 56% of the blocks/reward. What happened when it got this bad? The network hash rate would then suddenly drop to around 52%, then 50%, then 46%....and then back up.....

TL;DR Yep, I think the ~50% is both intentional and controlled, and it's totally being gamed.

It's almost like they're doing this on purpose. You should see 8btc, there's just a lot of FUD about F2Pool potentially attacking the network. But it is highly likely this will not happen. Although something like this should still be a concern, because a malicious attacker could potentially take control over the pool and double spend on the Litecoin network.